Facebook made a VR selfie stick :why ever leave home

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer showed off a demo using the Oculus Rift and its touch controller that let him share a VR space with someone at Facebook’s campus. While there, they explored several 360-degree photos from London, before arriving in front of Big Ben.

Once there, the remote user played tour guide, showing the Oculus wearer on stage around a static 360-degree photo of London. It was impressive in that it showed the possibilities inherent in VR tourism. Using such a system, along with the Oculus headsets, a local tour guide could give another person a full tour of a location without anyone ever hopping on a plane.

But no tour is complete without a selfie, and that's when Facebook blew our minds. The remote user pulled out a VR selfie stick, which had a virtual mirror on its end, and put his VR head next to the VR head of the Schroepfer, allowing them to take a VR selfie together in London from the comfort of their own remote environments.

And after the VR selfie, Facebook showed how the user could post it to their Facebook page by dropping it into a VR "mailbox" and watching it get beamed into the sky (ending up on your timeline).

SEE WORKING OF Facebook VR STICK BELOW

This process will be familiar to video gamers, many of whom (myself included) have spent far too many hours customizing the facial features of our in-game characters. At CES this year The Verge team got the chance to put our faces in the latest Fallout 4 ame with some help from Intel's RealSense camera. A number of projects have leveraged the Kinect camera from Microsoft's Xbox to pull off in-game personalization.